Greek Music
The Greek musical tradition runs as old as its architecture, writings, and theological evolution. In ancient Greece, poets and musicians looked to the muses for inspiration. There were nine of them, representing everything from epic poetry to tragedy to love songs and astronomy. From ancient times, Greek music existed mostly within its own country until the arrival of rembetika music in the United States in the 1960s.
Here is an overview of the roots of popular Greek music and an overview of its most widely-used instrument, the bouzouki.
Rembetika
Rembetika (sometimes translated as "rembetiko" or "rebetika") is the music of the Greek underground, rooted in the fringes of Greek society from as early as the 1920s. Rembetika originated in the hashish dens of Pireaus and Thessaloniki around the 1900s. Oriental influence permeated the composition, rooted in the immigration of 2 million Greek refugees from Asia minor. This fusion of traditional Greek music and Asian influence became the roots of Greek popular music, or "Laika." Etymologically, "Laika" means "popular," but often interpreted as synonymous with "urban folk" music. Rembetika is etymologically derived from Greek roots connected with subculture and counterculture, growing out of particulary oppressing urban circumstances.
Lyrics to rembetika music began as a poetic response to the harsh realities of being part of a marginalized urban subculture, incorporating themes such as crime and drinking, drugs, and violence. In more modern rembetika, there exists a very visible theme surrounding the hedonistic pleasure of drug use, songs of the sort have become classified as "hasiklidika." Musically, rembetika resembles a fusion of western harmonies and music of both the Greek mainland and the Greek islands, and ancient Byzantine music. Rembetika experienced a revival beginning in the '50s after the genre was censored in 1936 for unnacceptable content by Ioannis Metaxis.
Laika
Laika emerged after the popularization of rembetika, revived, in the '60s and '70s, and currently remains Greece's popular music genre. Contemporary laika songs in many ways resemble ballads and sentimental tunes, but have grown increasingly more reminscent of Western dance and pop music. Laika is heavly influenced by Turkish and Middle Eastern music, and is very much a multicultural fusion, thematically and harmonically. The genre has received a good deal of critical response around its often cliché themes and generic-sounding chord progressions, but its popularity remains unaffected.
Bouzouki
The bouzouki was brought to Greece in the 1900's by immigrants from Asia Minor, and quickly became the central instrument to the rembetika genre and its music branches. The name "bouzouki" comes from the Turkish word "bozouk," meaning "broken" or "modified," expressing the structure of the instrument as a customized version of its Turkish counterpart, the "saz-bozouk." It is in the same instrumental family as the mandolin and the lute, modified upon its arrival in Greece with a rounded, bowl-shaped back and angled so as to increase the strength of the body to withstand longer, thicker steel strings. The variation of the instrument used in Rembetika music was a three-stringed instrument, but in the 1950s a four-string variety was introduced.